The Girl at My Door: An utterly gripping mystery thriller based on a true crime

by Rebecca Griffiths

  ‘It’s rather warm in this little spot you’ve found. Would you mind awfully if I joined you? They seem to have run out of tables.’

  ‘Please do.’

  Joy had seen that creepy little man in the tennis shoes out exercising his dog again and felt immediately safer when Charles removed his coat and perched on the seat beside hers. It unsettled her that the man always seemed to be in the park when she was these days, and the idea he might be following her was deeply troubling.

  ‘Are you sure you don’t mind?’ He had sensed something was amiss.

  ‘Not at all.’ She gave him her best smile.

  His coat, folded over his knees, lay there like a sleeping animal and she resisted the urge to stroke it. He bashed out his pipe and refilled it with tobacco. Lit it and shook out the match. The smell of toasted marshmallow and vanilla reminded her of campfires in the woods along the banks of the Scarpe, the air full of birdsong and the heady scent of the flowering sweet chestnut.

  ‘Your English is impeccable – where did you learn to speak it so well?’

  ‘I spent five years on the Tendring Coast during the war.’ She avoided all mention of Queenie. ‘My parents sent me there to be safe.’

  ‘Sensible people. I saw rather a lot of your country during the war.’

  ‘Was France where you had your injury?’ She had spotted his cane.

  ‘This old thing?’ He swung it through the air. ‘It’s only a precaution. I take it when I go walking. Just a bit of shrapnel, it feels quite better in the warmer months.’

  ‘That’s good.’ She nodded, pleased for him. Unlike many men who’d returned from the war, he seemed to be in top physical health.

  ‘You’re a fan of Thomas Hardy?’ He pointed to the collection of stories in her lap. ‘I’m not much of a reader, but I did like The Three Musketeers as a boy. Not that I could read it in French, much to my mother’s annoyance.’

  Charles had a whiff of the seventeenth century about him. The moustache, the gleam on his thick dark hair. Something she was seeing in all its glory, now his fedora had been placed on the table beside her gloves. He looked like a musketeer. D’Artagnan. That’s what comes of having your head in too many books… Her mother’s voice, echoing Queenie’s. Unwelcome, snaking into her mind. It was always the same, whenever something good was about to happen. Joy shook it away. She didn’t want to be that girl who hid under her hair and shaded her mouth with her fingers. She was twenty, for goodness’ sake; she wasn’t a child any more. A child who needed to watch her every move fearing the burn of her mother’s precipitous smack.

  ‘Can I buy you another of those?’ Up on his feet, Charles signalled to her empty cup. ‘Or perhaps mademoiselle would prefer something stronger?’

  ‘That is kind.’ She couldn’t believe this glamorous man had singled her out in the crowd; and what a crowd there was at the Serpentine Café on this beautiful May morning. ‘I’ll have whatever you’re having.’

  ‘Is that wise?’ Mischievous, he touched her shoulder. The briefest of gestures, so brief she wondered if she’d imagined it.

  ‘Probably not.’

  ‘I tell you what…’ He laid his pipe on the ashtray. ‘I’ll get us a couple of coffees to start with.’

  To start with?

  Charles left his cane leaning against the table and his coat snoozing on his seat. Joy, uncomfortable with him gone, followed his progress from the terrace to the darkened café interior, then scanned around for the man in the trilby. Was relieved not to see him. She dropped her gaze to Charles’s pipe and saw the little grooves his incisors had made in the stem. It propelled her back to her eleven-year-old self aboard the bus to Paris. Wedged between her parents as the undulating patchwork of fields, then the tall green forests of northern France, were left behind, she had a bird’s eye view of her father’s pipe preparation. Not that the lighting of his Meerschaum was to everyone’s liking. A fellow passenger, balancing a crate of chickens on his knees, shouted at him to put it out and a fight nearly ensued. It was her mother who saved the day. Handing over money they didn’t have to waste. It was all that got them to the Gare du Nord and her seat on the Calais train. Where she sat, helpless, as her parents’ faces dissolved into the crowds on the platform and she was left alone. The next faces that were for her were Queenie’s grandparents – the two strangers who met her off the ferry at Dover. Fred, in his tweed knickerbockers and hair like a half-blown dandelion, and Mary, her face scrubbed smooth as a pebble. These were the people with the secluded farm in the dunes her father had told her about. A place where she learnt it wasn’t normal to be woken in the small hours to the sound of her parents arguing and that, contrary to what her mother told her, Joy was loveable.

  Charles was back. He placed the tray of coffees down and pulled up a chair. This time his knees touched hers beneath the table. It made her quiver. It made her nearly forget to breathe. He picked up his pipe and slotted it between his teeth. A series of small puffs got it going again. The dappled shade flickered patterns on the tablecloth and she noticed how he drank his coffee. How he sipped at it like a girl while the sun shone shyly through the leaves. Joy asked him about the war and the part he had played. She sat on her hands and listened to him talk. To his tone, the timbre of his voice. His hesitations and the silences that fell between breaths. Up close he smelled of pomade and tobacco. At some point, the green ribbon in her hair worked loose. Charles saw it and, leaning forward, retied it.

  If time ticked by, neither was aware of it. Time, so it seemed, was going on elsewhere, and it was as if they had been left to whirl around each other on a deserted dance floor. There was something about him: a warmth that made her want him to shelter her from the world she wasn’t sure she liked. He seemed gentle, kind, the way his eyes creased at their corners when he smiled. She was falling in love with him for this alone.

  He closed one of his hands over hers and gently squeezed as if to test the ripeness of a plum. It stopped her jittering. It nearly stopped her heart. She told herself it was wrong to feel like this – Charles was a married man.

  ‘Do I make you nervous?’

  She nodded. There was no point pretending. ‘I’m not used to being offered coffee by men I don’t know.’

  ‘And you have plenty of offers from men you do know?’

  Joy felt the pressure when he removed his hand. Noticed the sun going in behind the clouds.

  ‘Where’s your family today?’ She forced herself to ask about the blonde woman and boys she had seen him with.

  ‘My family?’ He darted a look of concern. ‘How do you know about them?’

  ‘I saw you in the park.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘A few weeks ago.’ Deliberately vague. ‘You’ve children, haven’t you?’

  ‘Children?’ he parroted. ‘Goodness me, no. No.’ He put his pipe away in a pocket, took out a silver cigarette case. Opened it and offered her one. She shook her head. ‘Those boys you must’ve seen me with…’ He paused, lit a cigarette and took a protracted drag. ‘They’re my brother’s twins.’ He exhaled a grey ribbon of smoke. ‘My late brother, Philip. He was killed in the war.’

  ‘Oh, dear. I am sorry.’ Joy gathered the collar of her jacket and balled it in her fist. Had she inadvertently pushed him into sharing something he wasn’t ready to?

  ‘Bobby and Samuel live in Kent. I don’t get to see them often.’

  ‘Was their mother the elegant lady you were with?’

  He laughed. ‘Their mother? No, that was my mother.’

  ‘Gosh, she looked young.’

  ‘I’ll remember to tell her that.’ He pulled on his cigarette again.

  At that moment, something shimmered beyond the trees, snatching her attention. It was that sinister little man again. He was inching his way along the path, his white dog full-stretch on its lead. The shock made her sit bolt upright and, narrowing her eyes against the glare, she stared at what she could see of him until he had been swallowed by the dark
recesses of undergrowth.

  Trembling, it was as if a cold moth had landed on her heart, and where its icy dorsal tufts touched, she was left with a horrible feeling of dread.

  ‘Are you warm enough? I could go and ask for a blanket.’

  ‘No, I’m perfectly fine.’ She rubbed her arms through her sleeves. ‘I thought I saw someone I recognised.’

  ‘Can’t have been anyone nice.’ He twisted his gaze in the direction she’d been looking.

  ‘It’s nothing. Don’t worry.’ She picked a corner of the tablecloth, hunted for straggles of thread to unpick. She would love to tell Charles about the stranger in the raincoat and her fears he could be stalking her. Would have done, had she not been wary of him accusing her of having an overactive imagination as Queenie had.

  Joy and Charles’s gazes collided, bold then timid: flickering shutters on a camera lens. She looked down on herself as doubts crowded in. How plain she was in her frumpy clothes, her sensible shoes. How she had barely bothered to pull a comb through her hair before coming out.

  ‘I’d love to see you again.’ His declaration swashbuckling through her perceived shortcomings.

  That pensive look. She was coming to recognise it, falling as it did between his dazzling smiles. He took her hand and led her away from the bustle of the café, with its clatter of crockery and bursts of laughter. Under the cathedral-like nave of trees where they stood facing one another. Overhead, a patch of blue showed through a tear in the clouds.

  ‘Joy.’ His voice finding her.

  ‘Yes.’

  And he kissed her.

  Lost in each other, they were oblivious to the danger loitering close by. Oblivious to the man who had the power to blight the perfect setting beneath the chestnut trees, the tables with their pretty gingham cloths that shifted in the breeze, just by being there.

  11

  ‘Come on, Judy.’ He tapped his thigh to beckon the dog to his side. ‘Let’s go and have a nose over here, shall we?’

  He abandoned the shady nook among the trees where he had been keeping an eye on them and moved towards the café. Found their recently vacated table and sat down. The still-warm chair where her womanliness had been, causing a small thrill deep in his groin.

  ‘Oh, aye.’ He recognised the plum-coloured gloves he’d often seen the girl wearing. ‘Careless to leave these behind, lass… but I suppose you had your mind on other things.’

  A dry chuckle as he picked them up. Delicately. Between finger and thumb. Emitting a low groan of pleasure as he did so. The gloves still held the shape of her, and it was too exciting to think of the parts of herself she would have touched with the very hands they had sheathed only moments before.

  He fondled them in the way he longed to fondle her. Losing himself to the exquisite softness of the leather nap, the silky lining, while his dog wandered around, trailing its lead, licking the crumbs from recent diners. He put one of the gloves in his coat pocket and lifted the other in both hands. Tugged open its throat and placed it over his nose and mouth in the same way he did with the gas mask he forced over the faces of the women… those desperate women he tricked into his rope chair.

  He breathed in.

  Deeply.

  Finding her scent.

  ‘Mm, such intimate things… and now they’re mine.’ He clasped the glove in his fist. ‘Just like you’re going to be, lass. I’ll have my way with you soon, and when I do, I’ll do more than just breathe you in.’

  12

  A burst of summer and London’s streets were bleached of shadow under the hot late-afternoon sun. A heat-struck pigeon flapped up off the pavement. It alerted Queenie to a man with a stoop who was waiting for her outside the Mockin’ Bird. A man old enough to be her father, with a headful of coarse grey hair. She scanned his face but couldn’t recall his name. He presented her with a posy of hothouse flowers and she nodded and listened politely. Laughing at the dirty joke she didn’t get. Then, waving a hand to excuse herself, she clipped along the side alley to the stage door. No need to use her key, it was open. A glance over her shoulder to check the man wasn’t following and she swapped the sunny street for the shadowy interior of the club.

  Airless and muggy, the Mockin’ Bird had its own distinctive smell. One that was only identifiable when you came in from outside. Not at night, when it was packed with people, but at quiet times like this. She breathed it in, classifying the smell of cigarettes and booze along with something else, from nature, like leaf mulch and roots. She heard the piano first. Ringing out like a voice from the dimness while she made up her mind about the smell. Terrence, seated at it in a dish of light, looked up when he heard the door close.

  ‘Hello, Queenie.’ He lifted his hands from the keys. ‘More flowers?’

  She waved the posy through the air and giggled. ‘Lord, it’s hot out there today.’ She made a detour to the bar. Nodded to Sammy, who was polishing the bottle tops.

  ‘Not so cool in here either.’ Terrence dragged the back of his arm over his perspiring brow.

  ‘How did last night go? Did I miss much?’ She found a suitable glass and filled it with water.

  ‘Not much. Was your meeting with Herbie’s people successful?’

  ‘It was just the one guy, sorting the contracts. Not that I’ve signed anything yet.’ She climbed onto the stage, dropped the posy into the tumbler and placed it on top of the piano. ‘They’re fixing flights and accommodation for me.’

  ‘Fancy you going off over the Atlantic. You’ve the world at your feet, darling.’ Terrence jumped up to kiss her cheek, then sat back down again. ‘And such wonderful news about Joy and Charles too, isn’t it?’

  ‘What wonderful news? I thought you said I didn’t miss anything.’

  ‘Hasn’t Joy told you?’

  ‘Told me what?’ Queenie frowned. ‘I haven’t seen her for days.’

  ‘Oh, then I suppose it’s up to me. Joy and Charles. Well…’ Terrence tapped his fingers against his bottom lip. ‘They’re practically engaged.’ He returned to the piano and picked out the tune for ‘I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire’.

  ‘You what?’ Queenie gawped at him askance. ‘Don’t be silly. Charles is married. He’s got children.’

  Terrence lifted his hands from the keys again. ‘Married? Whatever gave you that idea?’

  ‘Joy and me, we saw him in the park. I just thought…’ What she thought was: Joy’s my friend, not yours; how come you know about this and I don’t? ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter. But he’s way too old for her.’

  ‘The guy’s only a year or so older than me.’ She sensed him search her face but she refused to soften her expression: she was serious, deadly serious. ‘He’s perfect for her and you know it.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘Dear me, Queenie, darling.’ Terrence snorted. ‘I never had you down as the jealous type.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. It’s just a bit of a shock, that’s all.’

  ‘I don’t know why. You’re the one who said he’d been asking about her.’

  ‘All right then, maybe not such a shock. It’s just… I’m worried for her. He’s so…’

  ‘What?’ Terrence looked expectant.

  ‘Stylish. Worldly.’ It was hard to articulate the mix of feelings she hadn’t had the chance to process.

  ‘You’re not to go interfering.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes, you. I’ve seen the way you boss her around.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  The look Terrence gave told her this wasn’t true.

  ‘I don’t mean to.’ She unwrapped her headscarf, tossed it onto a nearby chair. ‘I’m just trying to help her make the most of herself.’

  Another snort. ‘I don’t think she’s going to need any more help in that department.’

  ‘Are we having a run-through, or what?’ Queenie, keen to change the subject. ‘Where are the others?’

  ‘Buster’s at the bar.’ Terrence rolled his eyes.

  Que
enie raised a hand, used it as a visor against the glare of stage lights. Picking Buster out of the gloom, she saw him lolling on a bar stool. ‘Is he drunk, d’you think?’

  ‘Probably. He was down in the dressing room sleeping when I arrived.’

  ‘Where’s Eddie?’

  ‘Running late. But Dick’s here somewhere. Want me to give him a shout?’

  ‘No, don’t bother. You and me can make a start. What d’you want to open with?’

  Terrence began playing the intro of another song by the Ink Spots when Buster bulldozed his way between them. Knocking over music stands, his face as dark as a thundercloud.

  ‘Dear me, Buster.’ Queenie took a step back to let him pass. ‘Are you going to be able to play tonight?’

  ‘Leave off, will ya?’ He took his jacket off and revealed a dark triangle of sweat on the back of his shirt. ‘You lot are always on at me.’ He tottered forwards, nearly falling. Pint glass in hand, he slopped most of his beer over his shoes.

  ‘You’re in a bad mood.’ A nervous giggle: Buster was a fuse that could blow at any moment. With his pale eyelashes and pinkish face, he epitomised many of the infantrymen who had come back from the war: physically unharmed but psychologically damaged.

  ‘I said leave off.’ He stumbled to the rear of the stage and took up his position behind the drums.

  ‘Excuse me, Buster.’ Terrence, unusually bold from his piano stool. ‘Don’t go taking it out on Queenie. It’s not her fault Joy turned you down.’

  ‘Now what’s gone on?’ It seemed that Queenie was the last to know about whatever this was too. It left her feeling stupid and insignificant.

  ‘I’ve seen ’em together, ain’t I?’

  ‘Seen who together?’

  ‘Joy and that bloody officer… smoochin’.’

  ‘Smooching? What are you talking about?’

  ‘Last night, I dunno. I’ve just seen ’em,’ Buster grumbled, almost incoherent. ‘What she ’ave to go and pick ’im for? I bloody hate officers… specially ’im. Bloody toff, splashin’ the cash. Flash bastard’s already got everythin’.’